The Race for the White House

This is a satirical photoessay I did for The Bear Facts, my high school paper, somewhere around April 1996. I cut out pictures of various 1996 presidential election candidates from the Bakersfield Californian and sundry newsmagazines, and captioned them a la MST3K. In an era of electronically set type, I did the layout for this page the old-fashioned way, by pasting stuff onto a big sheet of paper. I have the whole thing as one big graphic, but it's about 700K, so I split it up into chunks. Enjoy. The pictures are in the order in which I laid them out, by the way.

• The title. Nothing special. [43K]

• Bob Dole is in a cage. Help get Bob Dole out. Kris and I had this bit where Bob Dole falls into The Twilight Zone and he discovers that he always says "Bob Dole" instead of "I". And he's like "Bob Dole's gonna turn this country around! Bob Dole's gonna revive the economy!" and the people are yelling "Who is this Bob Dole? We'll elect him at once! Let him speak!" and Bob Dole is crying and shouting "Bob Dole is Bob Dole! Bob Dole is Bob Dole!" Andyway, the graphic is [91K].

• Pat Buchanan prepares to run the wetbacks out of this country the way the Founding Fathers did. [60K]

  (Historical note: One plank in Pat Buchanan's campaign platform was the creation of an electric (?) fence across our southern border in order to prevent Central and South Americans from crossing over and robbing American workers of sub-minimum-wage jobs picking tomatoes. I had to explain the joke to a few people, but it was worth it.)

• This picture of President Clinton scared me when I saw it in the Californian. It still does, actually. The scandals of his second term show this picture in a whole new light. [44K]

• Pat's fish story. [27K]

• It doesn't matter what comes, Steve Forbes goes better in life. Forbes is running again in 2000, which gives me more opportunity to mock him. [120K]

• Remember Lamar Alexander? He never stood a chance of winning the election, but I made fun of him anyway. [72K]

• This is probably the best one. Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan. [110K]

• One of the two pieces of clip art I used. The other one was the standard Constitution-and-quill-pen clip art. This one captured the spirit of the election much better, I think. [16K]